


First Contact

by medeadea



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Yes you read that right. it has MAGIC in SPACE, not the Polish kind of witcher sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-25 15:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7538461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/medeadea/pseuds/medeadea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsukishima Kei, Vice Head Engineer of the White Unicorn, has to seek help from a specialist before he can start his journey to Venus. He finds Kuroo, witcher by trade and overall suspicious but intriguing character.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Contact

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnarchyAnagrams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnarchyAnagrams/gifts).



> My dear recipient!  
> I sincerely hope you'll like this. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about you or your likes, so I was unable to tailor this to your preferences. That I ended up inventing the funkiest AU I've ever done is entirely my fault though, please forgive my selfindulgent ass...  
> This roughly follows your second request and honestly, I've come to like the universe a lot, so I'm thinking about making a series out of it. We'll see, maybe there will be more snarking later!  
> Big thanks go to my amazing and patient beta, thank you so much!  
> Now, please enjoy!

The sky sparkled above Tsukishima as he entered the third shady shop of that night. He paused behind the door to assess if this one was even worth the visit and decided against immediately backing out.

Tinny trilling filtered through the dry air and Tsukishima recognized it as the one and only David Bowie song he knew. He almost snorted. Apart from the admittedly antiquated music taste of the owner, the shop looked quite professional and tidy — clean shelves towering but evenly spaced, and filled with all kinds of scientific and less scientific equipment. Not that he’d have been able to make use of any of it, as his area of expertise was centred around fundamentally different machinery. Mainly   _ bigger _ machinery.

To Tsukishima’s left there stood an impressive worktable that he strode up to, wondering what kind of magic held the tottering stacks of paper documents in varying sizes upright and the tiny machine parts in between from rolling around and off the tabletop. He slowly lifted his hand and gave one of the paper towers a slight nudge, but it didn’t budge. At all.

“I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from touching my invoices, please,” a voice sounded from his right, the lilt in it amused.

Tsukishima flinched and retracted his hand to the seam of his uniform trousers. Stiffly he turned and eyed the man that stepped closer with narrowed eyes.

He was young, maybe around Tsukishima’s own age, and tall. Most noticeable on him — beside his veritable rat’s nest of black hair that was twirled up to a messy bun — was that he was tattooed quite heavily, or at least marked in some way. You never knew with these people. Tsukishima’s eyes were involuntarily drawn to the intricate motifs cascading down from pronounced collarbones over the chest and biceps he could see through the sheer fabric of the wide tunic the man wore. When Tsukishima caught himself and snapped his eyes back up, the shopkeeper was already properly amused and blinking at him.

“I’m guessing you’re here for advice and not for a refill on malachite powder or a new nitrate calibrator?”

Tsukishima frowned and chewed on his lip. Something about this man rubbed him the wrong way and he couldn’t pinpoint what it was exactly. But he did indeed need advice, so he ignored his gut instinct to answer rudely and pulled a small glass bottle out of his bag.

“Yes. I’m supposed to find out what’s in this bottle. We found it on our ship and need to know if we have to get rid of it because we’re about to depart on a research mission. The zoologist said it’s not a natural microorganism and to have a pseudo scientist look at it.”

The shopkeeper grinned and took the bottle, shaking the liquid contents to watch it slosh around.

“In that case you’re at the right address. Though I prefer the term  _ witcher. _ ‘Pseudo science’ sounds a bit old fashioned, not to mention rude, don’t you think, sweetheart?”

Tsukishima bristled at the over familiar nickname and especially at the wide, toothy smirk directed his way.

“Tsukishima Kei,” he said archly. “Don’t call me sweetheart.”

The shopkeeper took a step back and bowed so deep it couldn’t be described as anything but mocking.

“It’s nice to meet you, Tsukishima Kei. I’m Kuroo, witcher and solver of supernatural problems.”

He turned around then and strode towards the back of the shop, beckoning Tsukishima to follow with a careless gesture or his wrist.

They walked for longer than Tsukishima had thought possible, through shelves that held stranger and stranger seeming contents, but instead of becoming darker and spookier the shop turned more inviting. Where the front had only been illuminated by two cold neon lamps, this part of the room was filled by natural looking light that he couldn’t make out a source for. Even the music sounded less tinny, with a fuller harmony, more deserving of the long dead singer.

At the back of the room there was a long workbench with several analytical devices, from stereo microscopes to bigger machinery in closed cases.

Tsukishima watched Kuroo sink down on a stool in front of one of the optical microscopes and positioned himself at his side. He kept his eyes glued to his bottle in Kuroo’s hand, not entirely trusting him yet.

Kuroo paid him no mind, pulled out a small glass plate and screwed the bottle open. Using a simple plastic tool he sucked up a drop of the infested liquid and placed it on the glass plate. With his other hand he took an even tinier and thinner glass plate and slowly lowered it onto the drop. The fluidity of his movements entranced Tsukishima, so much that he took a second to realize that Kuroo held out the bottle he’d screwed shut again for Tsukishima to take.

Instead of a raised eyebrow at his delayed response however, Kuroo ignored Tsukishima completely, placed the glass plate on the microscope while switching it on, and immediately turned on some of the many screws of the thing.

When Kuroo leaned back from the device Tsukishima thought he had immediately recognized whatever that was under his lens and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

Kuroo laughed and wriggled his fingers at him.

“Patience, young man. Give my microscope a second to align the illumination, I haven’t seen much yet.”

And indeed, Tsukishima could see some of the screws on the device turn on their own, whatever it was they were doing.

“I might have squashed your organisms though,” Kuroo continued. “If that’s true they don’t have a shell and could probably be killed easily in case that’s necessary. If it’s some kind of mega bacterium, though, that could be ugly, but we’ll see.”

With that Kuroo turned back towards the microscope and left Tsukishima confused. He knew next to nothing about microorganisms, magic or otherwise, except for the fact that they were best kept out of the inside of his spaceship. They had a biologist on their team who was responsible for the oxygen and protein producing containers, but that guy was entirely too annoying for Tsukishima’s taste so he gave him a wide berth as often as possible.

For the next minute or two Tsukishima contented himself with inspecting the shelves behind them — which to his chagrin turned out to still hold nothing he was able to identify — and then Kuroo again. Kuroo who was engrossed in what he could see through the microscope, occasionally turning some of the screws, then leaning back and fiddling with a half full bottle of an electric blue solution.

Now that he could, Tsukishima let his eyes sweep over Kuroo freely. Kuroo’s markings spread over the whole expanse of his shoulders and neck down to the middle of his back and his elbows. Some seemed to even crawl up over his hips from the waistband of his trousers. It was obvious that they were of wildly different origins, some faded, others in vibrant colours, some curling in loops around others that consisted of superimposed geometrical shapes and hieroglyphs.

“You done staring at my tats soon?”

Tsukishima flinched and couldn’t prevent himself from flushing bright red. In that moment he realized what had bothered him about Kuroo from the beginning: It was his uncanny ability to make Tsukishima embarrass himself.

His eyes snapped up and he frowned at Kuroo who was still looking into the microscope. In a fit of petulance at Kuroo’s definite  _ guess _ (correct or not) Tsukishima folded his arms and grumbled, “I wasn’t, thank you very much.”

Finally Kuroo turned around and smirked up at him, so wide that the hair on the back of Tsukishima’s head bristled.

“Now you see, I know you’re lying,” Kuroo practically sang, folding his arms comically.

Then he turned again and stroked his fingers over the back of his neck where a stylised eyeball was tattooed.

“See that eye here? It detects if I’m being watched. Damned handy, don’t cha think?”

He had the audacity to wink at Tsukishima whose face colour still ranged around the crimson.

And as soon as that was done Kuroo went straight back to business. He got up and gestured Tsukishima to sit down in front of the microscope.

“You were right to come to me, because this is definitely an AI.

“It’s smaller than I thought at first and it’s not a megabacterium, you can see that at the blue circle in the middle. That’s the nucleus, I’ve coloured it with Optima Mater. And those weird shapes around it are a sign for supernatural intelligence.”

Tsukishima—still reeling from the abrupt subject change and his embarrassment—complied without complaint and looked into the microscope. He could see what Kuroo had described, the blue circle with winding shapes around it, surrounded by an oval that had protruding spikes all over.

“So is it dangerous?” He asked, still concentrated on the organism in front of his eyes.

“I don’t know that yet,” Kuroo sighed. “I’d have to have it grow in some conditions and do some tests. I’ve never seen such a thing, but then again I’m not an expert on microAIs. Nobody knows jack shit about those. When did you plan to start your mission?”

Tsukishima leaned back and looked up at Kuroo, his eyebrows drawing together. This whole discussion put him entirely out of his element and it annoyed him to no end.

“In two weeks, at the sixteenth. Would it be possible to determine what this is and exterminate it if necessary until then? The ship’s a S390.”

Kuroo nodded.

“The tests I need to run take a week at most, if I even manage to grow them in your spaceship environment. You’ll have to give me the environmental parameters of wherever you found these things and where they could migrate while in space. With a little bit of luck they’re totally harmless and don’t even grow in zero G.”

“Just harmless in zero G isn’t enough, this will be a long-time mission,” Tsukishima answered and got up off the stool. It was bad enough that two weeks before lift-off his team still wasn’t complete, but he’d hoped at least the  _ ship _ would be ready. Apparently not.

“Oh really?”

Kuroo turned around and walked back towards the front of the shop. Tsukishima followed and frowned. He could have sworn that this was the exact same aisle they had come through the first time, yet the contents of the shelves were completely different. Still a mystery to him, but different nonetheless. He tried to concentrate on his mission, familiar terrain instead.

“Yes. This is a twenty-five month mission to Venus in hyper-cloudal orbit, we will only be in zero G for 48 days and then 46 days on the way back. Will this make your tests more extensive?”

“Venus, huh?” Kuroo asked and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Hostile environment. Are you sure your team’s gonna make it?”

Tsukishima gritted his teeth and reminded himself that Kuroo couldn’t know how sore a subject the team was for him. He stretched his fingers from the fists he had involuntarily formed and breathed deeply.

“The team is still incomplete, if you must know. So no; I am unsure.”

A clang resounded from Tsukishima’s left and he heard Kuroo utter something in another language that was with ninety-five percent probability a swear.

“Your team’s incomplete?!” Kuroo exclaimed then and shook the hand he had apparently smacked against the shelf in agitation and upset some strangely glittering balls on it.

“What the fuck are they doing, sending their genius prodigies on abysmally planned missions to the damn Venus? Sudden appearances of microAI I can understand, but what is that nonsense?”

Tsukishima took a step back, eyebrows pulled up to his hairline. Kuroo was actually the first person to react like this over the state of their expedition. The only reasonable reaction, and a witcher—a pseudo scientist—was the only one to understand Tsukishima’s exasperation. This man was extraordinary.

“Excuse me? This is a research mission—”

“Yes, yes, a research mission, alright,” Kuroo repeated, waving his hands about. “An offhand attempt at satisfying the public need for acquisition of knowledge and  _ resources _ , all the while risking the life of their most promising junior staff! Don’t make big eyes, I recognise the uniform of a vice head engineer, and you’re no older than me.  _ What _ are they doing, risking your life?”

For the fourth or maybe fifth time since he had entered Kuroo’s shop, Tsukishima felt thoroughly flustered, only this time less uncomfortably so. He rubbed his fingers and started walking towards the front again, hiding his pink face as best as he could.

“I wanted to go on this mission and was best suited. And apart from the crew the planning is fine. It’s not like we have to search for candidates, it’s more a matter of choice anyway.”

Kuroo stayed silent until they reached the worktable at the front of the shop, brooding.

He dug an old tablet from the mess between the stacks of paper and pulled up an invoice form, adjusting it to his needs.

“I’ll need a sign here, and leave me a card, so I can contact you, please.”

The way Kuroo’s jaw worked and his fingers cramped made it obvious how desperately he tried to regain his composure and how hard of a time he had casting his concern off.

Tsukishima for his part couldn’t take his eyes of Kuroo. He had expected an arrogant and untrustworthy character from the second he’d stepped into the shop, and while he wasn’t ready to shed these impressions quite yet, there was also that silent professionalism and the unashamed attention Kuroo payed him that made him aware how little he still knew about him.

Silently he pressed his finger on Kuroo’s tablet and added the numeric code to transfer his contact. For some unfathomable reason Tsukishima felt the urgent need to assure Kuroo of the integrity of his expedition, but he had not the slightest idea how to do that.

“I hope you’ll find a proper witcher at least. Venus isn’t well secured yet, who knows what kind of magic runs free over there,” Kuroo muttered and took his tablet back.

Where someone like that could be found he didn’t add, and Tsukishima doubted that there would be any chance of them finding a fitting candidate for the team. They needed someone reliable, with proper work ethics. Someone knowledgeable but also sociable, since they would have to live on the same spaceship for two years after all.

Someone like Kuroo.

Tsukishima blinked. A thought like that was the absolute last thing he could allow himself, where had that even come from? He shook his head.

“If we find someone in the budget I’ll tell you next week,” he said, hoping that he would be able to do so. He might be tempted to do something very, very stupid otherwise.

Kuroo grinned and slowly rolled his shoulders to a relaxed posture.

“Next week,” he repeated and bit on his lip. “I’ll look forward to then.”

Tsukishima sucked a breath through his nose. _ There _ was the original Kuroo again.

He turned towards the door before he had the chance to embarrass himself for the sixth time in front of Kuroo and waved.

“Goodbye, Kuroo-san.”

“Goodbye,” Kuroo answered, a laugh in his voice. “One thing before you go, though—”

With his hand on the door handle and holding his breath Tsukishima turned back. Of course Kuroo wouldn’t let him go without a last jab so he steeled himself and willed his face blank.

Kuroo’s eyes sparkled with mirth over the palm of his outstretched hand like the stars in the sky outside and Tsukishima’s stomach plummeted.

“I’ll need that bottle with the organisms.”


End file.
